The number of households with three or four generations living under the same roof has increased to Victorian-era levels, a new study has shown.

Family history website Ancestry.co.uk said multi-generational households had risen by 7% over the past five years to more than half a million, a number last seen in the mid-1800s.

The figure will increase further in the coming years and will surpass the Victorian peak of 608,000 by 2030, said the report.

Almost a million households also have lodgers, a similar figure to Victorian times.

Miriam Silverman, UK content manager at Ancestry.co.uk, said: "Now that we have all the censuses digitised and indexed, we have a data source like no other in terms of understanding how our ancestors lived their everyday lives.

"The first chapter in our Changing Times report tells us how the boom that came with the industrial revolution led to some quite severe overcrowding - just as we are experiencing today.

"Proportionally, this issue isn't as severe as experienced by our ancestors, but it's interesting to see how a property boom driven by economic growth can quickly price millions out of the market - whether in industrial Manchester in the 1800s, or the suburbs of London today."